Category: Science & Technology

The Technological Herbarium, by Gianna Maria Gatti

Gianna Maria Gatti’s book The Technological Herbarium (subtitled: “Vegetable Nature and New Technologies in Art Between the Second and Third Millennia”) is a study of “interdisciplinary” works of art that exemplify the increasing importance of science and technology in artistic creation. Her analysis, however, goes beyond that of a journalistic or curatorial survey of artworks.

July 29, 2010
Alan N. Shapiro interviewed by Gerry Ryan

I was deeply saddened to learn of the death of Gerry Ryan on April 30, 2010, Ireland’s premier radio and television broadcaster and interviewer. Gerry was a great communicator. Gerry was a huge Star Trek fan. On June 1, 2005, I was interviewed for 45 minutes by Gerry on the Gerry Ryan Show.

July 23, 2010
Data and Baudrillard, by Franco La Polla

This is a translation of one chapter of Franco La Polla’s book Star Trek: Foto di Gruppo con Astronave. La Polla is a distinguished Professor of the History of North American Culture at the University of Bologna. He has written and published three amazing books on Star Trek.

June 25, 2010
Dance and Digital/Virtual Technologies, by Jaana Parviainen

Dwelling in the virtual sonic environment: Phenomenological analysis of dancers’ learning processes in working with the Embodied Generative Music interface. “We must admit that the sound, of itself, prompts rather a grasping movement, and visual perception the act of pointing.” (Merleau-Ponty)

June 22, 2010
From The Technological Herbarium, by Gianna Maria Gatti – Teleporting an Unknown State, by Eduardo Kac (translated by Alan N. Shapiro)

Telepresenza, bio arte, arte transgenica: questi saranno i temi al centro del racconto di Eduardo Kac, l’artista che a partire dagli anni ‘80 è stato il pioniere delle nuove declinazioni artistiche del biologico ed è riconosciuto internazionalmente come fondatore della Transgenic Art.

June 6, 2010
The Answer to the Question of Artificial Life

Artificial Life is an emerging movement within computer science which has as its goal to make software that is more “alive” rather than mechanistic. This goal is similar to our goal. However, Artificial Life has overlooked something very important and obvious. It has overlooked that “vitality” already exists in knowledge fields and in creative arts.

April 18, 2010
Alan Sokal on French theory and Science

Ah yes, rely on so-called “French theory” so-called authority Alan Sokal to provide you with an excuse to not read Baudrillard, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Lacan, and Virilio. That’s very bright. Ignore the intellectual contribution of an entire nation. The one that co-invented democracy.

April 15, 2010
The Star Trekking of Physics, by Alan N. Shapiro

In spite of the proliferation of exhilarated technoculture and its multidisciplinary, wired self-image, there remain some straightlaced, uncool tendencies within the techno-elite which boil over at the thought of all this openness to the humanities and the soft.

April 15, 2010
Captain Kirk Was Never the Original, by Alan N. Shapiro

In its prevalent forms, the cottage consumer industry of Star Trek is a classic virtuality of identification where the viewers’ senses of self, otherness, and reality are blurred by the contemplation of iconic spectacles. The fanatic relationship to media objects and fetishized paraphernalia is a partial, transitional realization of the reign of simulacra.

April 15, 2010
Considerations on Transgenic and Biotech Art, by Gianna Maria Gatti (translated by Alan N. Shapiro)

At the Experimental Art Foundation of Adelaide, Australia, there took place in 2004 the exhibition “Art of the Biotech Era” organized by Melentie Pandilovski. It involved the principal exponents of the artistic sphere connected to biology, genetics and bio-technologies, showing their projects and realizations.

April 15, 2010
From The Technological Herbarium, by Gianna Maria Gatti – Osmose by Char Davies (translated by Alan N. Shapiro)

To enter inside a tree and exit it through the leaves after having participated in its process of chlorophyllous photosynthesis: this is one of the many journeys that Char Davies makes the user of Osmose experience in an immersive, interactive, and multisensorial virtual reality environment that was developed and produced in 1995.

April 15, 2010
Adolf Portmann on the New Biology, by Gianna Maria Gatti (translated by Alan N. Shapiro)

This action, offering light to the plant, enables the latter to externalize its ‘interiority’. A fascinating interpretation that, deriving from an unusual vision of the artwork, instills in it a deeper and certainly original value. Suggesting this original meaning is the theory developed around the time of the 1960s by the Swiss biologist Adolf Portmann.

April 15, 2010
From The Technological Herbarium, by Gianna Maria Gatti – Telegarden by Ken Goldberg (translated by Alan N. Shapiro)

Telegarden is a telerobotic installation that enables users of the World Wide Web to see and cultivate a real garden. Conceived in 1994, it was activated in June 1995 at the University of Southern California and presented, over the course of the summer, at the leading international exhibitions of digital art and technology.

April 15, 2010
Nature: A Fragment, by Johann Wolfgang Goethe

Rereading the reflections in which, at the end of the seventeenth century, Goethe voices his hymn to Nature, one acquires the sense of just how advanced is contemporary man in adding those ‘secrets’, in gaining access to that ‘forge’, in procuring those ‘powers’ which Goethe credits exclusively to the great artist Nature.

April 15, 2010
Merleau-Ponty and Marx on Nature and Art, by Gianna Maria Gatti (translated by Alan N. Shapiro)

Man places between himself and nature those signs useful to denote and represent it, sanctioning the beginning of the autonomous differentiation of the phenomenal world. In the Upper Paleolithic, the figurations of wild animals drawn on the walls of caves, between magic and the practice of the satisfaction of vital needs and control over nature.

April 15, 2010